If there is one person in the world who knows all my faults
and shortcomings it’s me. I can see every little thing, every little blemish,
every little faux pas, every little slight and read into it so much more. From our early childhood, we learned criticism
from those trying to teach us, and we also learned to augment criticism with
our own versions of self-control and commentary.

I was working with a client the other night who was
complaining about how his overactive critic was always encouraging comparisons of
himself to others – and of course, he was coming out as the loser. And the question he asked was why do I do
this to myself and how can I get this voice to stop? By now you’ve probably learned that ignoring
it doesn’t help – it just gets louder and more insistent, demanding that you
pay attention to the warnings, the commentary, the critical disinformation that
it is forcing on you.

We are habituated to controlling and being controlled
starting from the time we are babies. We
come into the world without any understanding of our surroundings, and those
who are taking care of us and guiding us provide their commentary as a means
for us to learn about what’s around us and how we interact with it. And because we are thinking beings, we absorb
this commentary and add our own analyses.
The funny thing is that our commentary can get stuck in time. We told ourselves when we were little that we
couldn’t do something because it was too hard for us to physically accomplish,
and here, years later, we are still telling ourselves the same thing. When we create these messages they come back
at us from the past with no sense of time or how we have changed.

I find that when I work with clients to talk to the voice
about why it is critical, the most common answer is to keep the client safe and
protected. Protection to a 2 year old is
very different from that for a 38 year old, but the inner critic has not
progressed in time, thus the critical voice tends to be relevant for a child
rather than an adult. And because it is
stored subconsciously and is triggered by subconscious emotions and responses,
there is nothing that causes the critical commentary to align with your current
state.

So as we were addressing the critical commentaries that my
client was suffering, we made a conscious decision to force the critic and the
voice into consciousness. We started
this process in a couple of ways.

The first was to do some EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique)
on the critic and how these negative thoughts and statements were habitual
commentary that the client no longer needed or wanted, that the client is
choosing self-love over self-condemnation, and this is a conscious choice
because he loves and accepts himself as he is today. If you aren’t familiar with EFT, it is a
wonderful tapping process that encourages you to be both mentally and
physically present, and facilitates you in removing energetic blocks that keep
you emotionally and physically stuck.

The second was to come up with a strategy that the client
could use in the moment when the voice started in to bring the commentary to
the conscious level, to do something physical to release any emotion before he
did damage to himself, and to acknowledge that this was an old habit that he no
longer wanted or needed. We went through
a number of options including getting up, drinking some water, walking around,
taking some deep breaths, and finally he settled on a simple form of bilateral
stimulation. By simply tapping his knees
alternately with the palms of his hands he found he was able to bring himself
back into his body, eliminate the anxiety and tension he was feeling, and
acknowledge his worth in the moment. And when he practiced this, he found that
his tension lessened and the voice dissipated because it wasn’t relevant in his
current physical environment.

So while we learned to be strict parents to ourselves, we
also need to allow ourselves to grow up into our adult selves and reinforce
that is our adult nature that now is and should be in charge of our
behavior. And when the inner critic
shows up to parent the baby inside us, we simply need to reinforce who we are
today, what we want for ourselves, and how we are worth the success and
happiness we are working to achieve. A
little self-love and reinforcement of being present in our bodies can go a long
way to create a new habit where the critic is simply a voice from the past to
be dismissed without any emotion or further action needed.